Film Schools Are Embracing AI. Should They?

Jake Panek, a 20-year-old film major, says he’s had a great time at DePaul University in Chicago, and a very positive experience with the school’s cinema program. However, a recent email alerting students to a new course in “AI screenwriting” triggered a wellspring of untapped rage in him.

The email, which was circulated last week, offered undergrads the opportunity to examine “the rapidly evolving role of artificial intelligence in the screenwriting process” and to help students “explore how AI can support and enhance creativity in writing for film and television.” Panek wasn’t having it.

Not long after he received the email, the young filmmaker was so angry that he took to Instagram to express his thoughts: “seeing this email made me embarrassed to be a depaul film student,” he wrote, tagging the school and its film program. “I think the professor that’ll be ‘teaching’ this course, every student who enrolls in this course, and everyone who is allowing this course to happen should seriously reconsider it—THIS COURSE SHOULD NOT BE A THING.”

When Panek talked to me about the program, his disdain for the class didn’t seem to have waned much. “I think it’s bullshit,” he told me. “I’m just so angry at the very existence of it.”

DePaul’s School of Cinematic Arts is considered one of the top film programs in the country, and it has often distinguished itself by allowing the student body to access cutting-edge equipment and software. Recently, however, officials at the school have become interested in AI. In May, the film program held an “AI in the Arts” symposium, designed to explore “the transformative role of Artificial Intelligence in the arts.” Even before this event, certain people within the administration have been pushing the film program to further explore integration of AI into its curriculum, said Matthew Quinn, the DePaul professor who has been tasked with teaching the new screenwriting course.

“Our school, the School of Cinematic Arts, is in the College of Computing and Digital Media,” said Quinn. “Our dean is from the School of Computing, so they’re of course very invested in AI.” DePaul also has an AI task force, he added, noting that there was a university-wide effort to study and integrate AI into the curriculum.

What does an “AI screenwriting” course entail? Quinn said that the course was very similar to other screenwriting courses that he’d taught, with the key difference being that generative AI was used to help create and shape the material. “So, like when it comes to generating log lines and then working on character bios and character development, and then ultimately culminating with a step outline [a step outline is a summary of a script’s scenes],” Quinn said that students in the class would “collaborate” with ChatGPT. Later, students would participate in a workshop where their assignments were discussed, Quinn said. Students would talk about their creative process, discuss their collaborations with the chatbots, and explain what was “helpful” and what wasn’t. The class was designed to replicate “the process of developing a script,” he said.

Quinn also noted that, currently, DePaul’s film program has a policy that requires students to acknowledge the use of AI in screenwriting. If students use it, they have to explain why and how, he said. It’s currently at the faculty’s discretion to determine whether students can use AI in that way or not, he added.

DePaul isn’t the only film school that has begun to offer AI-related courses. The University of Southern California recently launched an AI for Media and Storytelling studio, which is designed to explore how the tech can be integrated into the film, media, and journalism industries. UCLA Extension recently launched a new course called “Creative Process in the Age of AI,” and even the American Film Institute has dipped its toes into the space, having debuted a three-day seminar series on “Storytelling and AI” earlier this year.

Holly Willis, the co-director of USC’s AI studio, said the school got interested in developing a new AI program in 2023, not long after the release of ChatGPT and the groundswell of cultural interest in generative AI. “It was kind of around that same time,” Willis said. “I think at that moment, it was such a huge thing, we realized ‘Oh, this is a really important shift’,” she said.

Willis, who has now taught multiple courses examining potential creative applications of AI, describes herself as “deeply critical” of the technology but also said that she was “very excited about [the] new forms of storytelling” that the tech could provide. “I think there are definite problems with generative AI and how it’s been introduced to filmmakers and artists, and how, right now, much of the ownership of the tools is within a corporate context,” she said.  “But at the same time, the work that I’m seeing artists do is really exciting.”

In an article about AI’s use in the arts, Willis highlights the work of Souki Mansoor, a former documentarian who “stumbled into the AI filmmaking rabbit hole” and now works in the tech industry. Mansoor, who served as a guest speaker in one of Willis’ AI-themed classes, currently works for OpenAI as “Sora Artist Program Lead,” according to her LinkedIn profile. It’s unclear what that really means, but Mansoor, who describes herself as a “recovering filmmaker,” has produced some visual pieces using platforms like the ones OpenAI is currently marketing. Indeed, in 2023, she “generated” a short film dubbed An AI Dreams of Dogfish, using prompts entered into RunwayML’s Gen2.

While Willis expresses excitement for works of the sort that Mansoor has produced, she notes that some of her students seem a little concerned about the infusion of AI into the arts. “I would say that students are very nervous,” she said. “The first class I taught when we started this initiative, students were very wary…like, ‘Why are we paying for this education when anyone can now create these images so easily?'” They didn’t realize that you still needed “skills and storytelling,” she said.

As for DePaul’s AI screenwriting course, Quinn said he hasn’t seen a ton of pushback from students, but there doesn’t appear to be a whole lot of interest either. “Right now, there’s not even that many students enrolled in it,” Quinn told me. “It might not even run.” He further clarified that the course wasn’t about mindlessly embracing AI. Instead, he described it as a workshop designed to expose students to different perspectives on the “current state-of-play” of the technology and what it could potentially offer creatives. Quinn admitted that he, himself, was “conflicted” about AI’s use in the creative arts. “It’s not like I’m a huge proponent of AI and love AI,” he said. “It’s more like, as an educator, I feel like I’m doing a disservice to students if I’m not exposing them to this or pretending like it’s not happening.” Quinn wants students to make an informed decision on whether they want to engage with AI or not, and to do that, they need to understand it.

For students like Panek, however, the whole thing seems like a huge betrayal of the fundamentals of the creative process. “I understand the desire, as an artist, to take a shortcut,” Panek offered. After all, making movies is really difficult, and it can often feel like the world is against you. But Panek said that he and his fellow students find their own ways to solve problems—that’s part of making movies. “Taking the shortcut of generative AI” ultimately “doesn’t do anything for anyone,” he said. “You’re not gaining anything by typing something into a computer and having it spit something back at you,” he added.

“Filmmaking is hard,” Panek said, while noting that if “you’re not willing to…find your own solutions to things, and your first thought is just, ‘Oh, well generative AI exists, let’s just use that'” it’s hard to really call yourself an artist.